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Bigotry in Motion

T.S. ELIOT WAS ONE OF THIS CENTURY'S pre-eminent poets, a great artist and perhaps the premier modernist. He was also an anti-Semite, a racist and a misogynist.

Although these two statements should be self-evident to anyone who has read his body of work, they have proven peculiarly difficult for literary scholars and ardent ''Waste Land'' fans to swallow. Reaction to two new Eliot books suggests that we are reluctant to acknowledge the obvious: that talent does not translate into wisdom, that beauty does not mean truth.

The publication this month of the American edition of ''Inventions of the March Hare'' -- a collection of poems written when Eliot was in his 20's and discovered in a notebook -- not only illuminates the youthful Eliot's development as a poet but should also confirm what previously published poems have already made perfectly clear: that Eliot was a bigot who regarded Jews, blacks, women and members of the working class with fear and contempt.

In ''March Hare,'' Eliot writes about a Negro, all ''teeth and smile,'' and titles an interview with Booker T. Washington ''Up From Possum Stew!'' or ''How I Set the Nigger Free!'' One long, scatological poem features a sexually well-endowed black monarch named Bolo, who is attended by ''a wild and hardy set of blacks'' -- ''an innocent and playful lot/But most disgusting dirty.''

When these poems were published last fall in England, Eliot's chief spin doctor, the poet Craig Raine, wrote a lengthy piece in The Observer defending Eliot against charges of racism. In the article -- headlined ''T. S. Eliot is innocent'' -- Raine argued that ''the point of scatological verse is that it knows* it is transgressive. The true racist thinks he is right. The writer of scatological verse knows he has gone too far.'' In other words: Eliot was not a real racist, because he knew his poems were offensive.

It was also Raine who led the defense of Eliot last year, when Anthony Julius's fierce indictment ''T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form'' was published. Take ''After Strange Gods,'' often considered the No. 1 exhibit of Eliotan anti-Semitism, in which the poet wrote that ''reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews underdesirable'' and ''a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.'' Explicating this notorious lecture, Raine made the absurd argument that Eliot was merely advocating ''the equivalent of the Labour Party's immigration policy.''

Other critics have been equally willing to tie themselves in knots on Eliot's behalf. Although it's clear that Julius censures the poet without censoring his poems -- a sensible view that holds the artist responsible for his politics while avoiding the esthetic intolerance of political correctness -- the critic Wendy Lesser compares Julius with the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon, who has called for the outlawing of pornography. Christopher Ricks, the editor of ''Inventions of the March Hare,'' has suggested that prejudice was less a position of Eliot's own than an idea explored in his work. And William Empson has asserted that Eliot's anti-Semitism was simply a reflection of his times.

This same sort of excuse-making machinery has been cranked up for other cultural figures as well. Hannah Arendt discounted Martin Heidegger's Nazi sympathies by arguing that an ''inclination toward the tyrannical could be demonstrated theoretically in many of the great thinkers.'' Jacques Derrida used post-structuralist arguments to try to show that Paul de Man's pro-Nazi writings were not really pro-Nazi. And defenders of Ezra Pound have argued that his radio broadcasts for Mussolini were an aberration resulting from temporary mental unbalance.

Why are all these critics in denial? Well, it's partly the legacy of deconstruction, which enables readers to argue that a text does not mean what it appears to say. It's partly the sentimental notion that art redeems, that it washes away the sins of its creator. And it's partly the popular belief that artists are monstres sacres, granted moral carte blanche.

No one has promoted this last view more vigorously than artists themselves. ''If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate,'' Faulkner once declared. ''The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.'' As for Norman Mailer, he tried to explain away Picasso's cruelties toward his wives, mistresses and friends, writing: ''If he was a monster, we have no alternative but to accept him. We ought to know that violence and creativity all too often connect themselves inextricably.''

This desire to see artists -- and would-be artists -- as ''transgressive'' figures, unfairly condemned by a smug, bourgeois society, naturally encourages supporters to absolve them of personal responsibility. This is the case with Eliot and Pound. It is also the case, on a very different level, with Dennis Rodman, whose obnoxious behavior -- kicking a cameraman in the crotch during a basketball game -- has been rationalized by those eager to hold him up as a threatening symbol of gender-bending daring.

In our therapeutic society today, no moral lapse is too awful to be forgiven, explained away -- or cashed in on. Last year, a self-dramatizing memoir by a former neo-Nazi named Ingo Hasselbach was published to much fanfare. And last month, TV commentators observed that O. J. Simpson could make millions if he wrote a best seller in which he confessed to the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman and then repented.

In the case of artists like Eliot and Pound, who never repented, there are plenty of critics around to attribute imagined contrition. Despite the lack of hard evidence, Pound's defenders insist that the poet renounced his fascist beliefs toward the end of his life, and Christopher Ricks similarly suggests that Eliot was trying to make amends in ''Little Gidding,'' when he wrote of ''the awareness/Of things ill done.'' Never mind that this phrase is ridiculously vague. Never mind that Eliot read his anti-Semitic poem ''Gerontion'' at a poetry recital in late 1943, after the existence of the gas chambers had become common knowledge.

Other critics go even further. Asked by a reporter about the ugly new poems contained in ''March Hare,'' Craig Raine responded, ''To me, they simply add to his humanity.'' Thus the perverse -- and contradictory -- notion that prejudice is a sign of membership in the human race, while genius exempts an artist from ordinary rules of human decency.